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I write all the time in my notes app and voice notes about my thoughts around knowledge, and my journey to and from these thoughts. They form the basis of the Sweet Medicine Library and Public Education Centre that I am building. I thought that I might as well start leaving some of my thoughts out here in the open, in case someone might find them and want to engage with me through them.
The process of forming ideas is a journey through a forest or a town, for me. And I add ‘for me’ not because I don’t think it’s a journey for other people, but because there might be people for whom the process is not a journey. Maybe it’s more like a snapshot; maybe it could be a journey, but it’s a journey they never take because they would rather sit and let things rise from the ground, or look out and see what passes their view.
Anyway.
Last year, I wrote around this time last year that:
Through this four-year project of treating the everyday as archive, the informal as theory, and the personal as data, I saw a lot about how Nigerian life, the social, moral, spiritual, and imaginative economies are the immaterial engine driving the nation’s material conditions, its politics, and financial economy.
And the fundamental challenge—at the level of ideas—of Nigerian life that I am most concerned with and most equipped to address is disconnection: from one’s self, community, history, and the environment.
In response to this challenge, I’m working on a theory of knowledge as relational continuity: Life, Nigerian life with its webbing of informality, especially, continually improvises intelligence. To know is to stay in rhythm with that improvisation, not to possess information. To pursue knowledge in this way is to engage in social healing, where healing is ultimately about restoring our capacity to dig deep where we stand, not about erasing wounds or returning to some pure state. It’s a process that requires both contact and distance, rhythm and rest.
What has developed since then is that it’s no longer "knowledge as relational continuity" for me—one starts with clunky language—but relational continuity is the key condition that allows knowledge to happen. I still believe that knowledge is not primarily something people possess, but rather something that happens between people, through shared attention to reality. Very Freirean problem-posing model of education. I believe many schools we have today are to education what restaurants and cafeterias are to food.
I see the point of inquiry not as arriving at a final, correct description of the world that a person then owns but entering into a relationship—a practice of acknowledged reciprocal attention—with reality, another person, yourself, history, language, or the environment that allows each party/entity to disclose more of itself over time. (Everything I touch, I change, and everything I change, changes me.) The process of knowledge is therefore less like acquiring an object and more like cultivating a relationship. So, just as you never "finish" knowing a friend, you never finally possess knowledge of the world. You deepen the relationship.
I hear the questions: And so what? What does this distinction matter? How is it different from any other posture, e.g., the dominant ‘justified true belief’ definition?
On some days I am in touch with that. But on other days, like today, I’m far inside the essence of the thing I am knowing (knowledge itself) that I’m not interested in going up and down the corridor between essence and ‘so what’. I may come back another day to blog when I’m closer to the ‘so what?’ door, and I’ll explore what I find there.
Back to what I sense of the essence. For me, when someone shares information or explains how they arrived at a conclusion, I do not take it that they are giving me objects to build the foundation of [my] reality on. I treat it as insight into their way of attending to reality. For me, everything I hear or see, I take as someone’s scaffolding of their world. Likewise, when I ask questions or journey to an answer, I’m not extracting facts or evaluating correctness; I am sharing my own scaffolding. Inquiry is, for me, visiting each other’s minds to see how it’s there, how you did up your sink, what other ways there are to knit one’s own rugs, what the temperature is like in your garden on a sunny day. When someone investigates me collaboratively, and allows me to investigate them collaboratively, I experience that as supreme enjoyment. And as care, a care that heals and fortifies me, and I believe the other party too. Knowledge for freedom, for social healing, happens when neither party takes the visit as imprisonment and neither party seeks to imprison.
Sometimes, I might encounter things that prey on me, and I didn’t bring the tools or gear to protect myself, then I’m gonna skedaddle. Bye. Thanks for showing me your house, but I don’t wanna know more of it right now or maybe ever at all. There are a million other houses down the block and a million other visitors you can have.
When I speak and think of Sweet Medicine as a library and public education centre, it is because I’m treating it as an ecology for a particular mode of relationship. It exists to create the conditions under which people can encounter one another through shared inquiry, whatever the inquiry is on—themselves, their communities, their histories, the world around them. Companionship in the presence of—and with—reality.
With education, my concern is with the quality of attention that produces and sustains knowledge for sovereignty. And that quality of attention is often, though—crucially—not always, at odds with the time and attention the market economy consumes. In an ideal world, I believe in trade schools, but I, personally, was born into an upper-middle-class society that entangled prestige- and approval-driven education with my social world, you know, the very thing that shapes your habits and tastes and that you survive on. So when I say I believe in trade schools and my pedigree shows otherwise, I’m aware of this one contradiction. But yes, I believe in trade schools as what is needed to build skills to trade in the market. And in an ideal world, trade schools exist alongside centres of critical thinking and learning that are available and routine for all members of society. Like the routine position religious institutions like the church occupy in society today.
As you might imagine, because of this, universities and degrees as credentialising institutions currently bore me—much as they are useful in the job market—and this boredom sometimes brings out arrogant and dismissive parts of me, despite my lifelong participation in them. Because, to be sure, my love and respect for deep, rigorous research that goes on in universities cannot be threatened.
Medieval Western universities were founded primarily as credentialing institutions transmitting authorised texts to train clergy, lawyers and physicians. A lot of thinking and knowledge production happened in the process as well, but the university as a research/knowledge-producing institution is largely said to be a 19th-century graft credited to Wilhelm von Humboldt. Lore—however disputed—has it that during his brief stint running Prussia's education section, Humboldt founded the University of Berlin in 1810 around the principle of Einheit von Forschung und Lehre (the unity of research and teaching) that produced the dynamic of the professor's job to produce new knowledge, and students to learn by apprenticing to that production (the seminar, the laboratory, the doctorate as original contribution). But modern universities remain yoked to the credentialing function they were founded on, a template African universities inherited after colonisation, or with which they were built during colonisation.
Meanwhile, the global capitalist economy and its national outposts struggle to fund and democratise the knowledge-producing function of the university, and at the frontline of this struggle is the humanities. This is a ripe moment, as a lot of moments in the past have been, for other kinds of institutions to be experimented with for creating new knowledge, and maybe this time, without one of the Enlightenment’s children: universalism + progress theory—humanity is one plus history moves along a single track from savagery through barbarism to civilisation, and that Europe happened to be standing at the front of the line. Without a civilising mission.
Okay, another day we continue. I’m spilling into another room.
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As I use them-
Knowledge for freedom/healing: what happens between entities through attention.
Education for freedom/healing: practices that cultivate that capacity of attention.
Institutions for freedom/healing: environments that make those practices durable.
“Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not preparation for life but is life itself." - John Dewey in Democracy and Education.
